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Showing posts from July 29, 2012

Glossary versus Vocabulary versus Concept System

Just a brief note on something that has been bothering me for a while. In reading Prof. Campbell Harvey's Hypertextual Finance Glossary ( http://www.duke.edu/~charvey/Classes/wpg/glossary.htm ) I noticed that it contains the ISO 4217 Currency Codes, e.g. there is an entry for "USD" with the definition "The ISO 4217 currency code for the USA Dollar".   However, the ISO 4217 Currency Codes are sprinkled though the glossary, because all terms are arranged in alphabetical order (actually, lexicographical order since numbers and symbols have to be taken into account). This means that there is no single list of ISO 4217 Currency Codes in the Glossary.  To extract them would require searching on a piece of text, such as "4217" which is hopefully in every definition.  Figure 1: Concept System of Customer Type It also requires the searcher to know in advance that there is such a concept system as Currency Code.  But how is this always possible?  Consider what

Definition Reference

In the previous posts I had the idea of a person or group that creates a definition.  This was a rough draft of a part of another concept system that I am calling Definition Reference.  Figure 1 shows this concept system.  The unquoted terms are the official terms in this concept system.  The quoted terms are shortened versions of the official terms, which are univocal (have only one meaning) within the concept system, but are generally equivocal (have more than one meaning) if you increase scope to beyond the system shown here, and must be used with care. Figure 1: Definition Reference Concept System The Concepts in The System The concepts in this system are as follows: Definition Reference: a source of a definition Informal Definition Source: a Definition Reference that cannot be relied upon. There is no guarantee that it is correct. Definition Authority: a Definition Reference that can be relied on. There is some kind of guarantee that it is correct. Definition Authoritative R